Jesus is the way and that way is the Gnostic Christian way.

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I am glad your beliefs make you happy. I personally am an Agnostic Atheist. I am glad when someone finds the belief or non belief system that allows you to live the happiest, most moral, and most productive life possible.

On a completely different forum (not WP) this came around in the last couple days and I had to express my dissatisfaction with the word and concept 'supernatural'. The way we use the terms today, natural and supernatural, is synonymous with real and not-real. It's a problem because if anything that mainstream science currently doesn't think is real happens to be real it would have to then fall under the umbrella heading of 'natural'.

I ran into a someone on Facebook who was stunned that I wasn't a tidy reductive-materialist, asked me why, I mentioned some of the glaring embarrassments of naive physicalism (Dean Radin's one of many who keeps pouring salt in the double-slit and psy wound, you can add all the ivy-league random number generator tests known as the global consciousness project as well as increasing 'quantum biology' that keeps cropping up). The response I got back was something like 'Oh, science will figure that out' - as if that meant that whatever science 'finds out' would fall rather neatly into current interpretations of what the accrued and credited information means. Increasingly I see that camp as people just going for the popular religion of the day, ie. naive physicalism. It's clearly not science, it's popular and cult-like, believed whole-heartedly by a lot of people who haven't really sorted through the contents well, so with those things lined up I'm not sure what else I can call it without charity turning into something else altogether.

I'm not necessarily trying to come down on the side of organized religion with that either - that's by and large steeped in worse BS. I'm just thinking that to split the universe into natural vs. supernatural is incredibly 18th century of us and we should try moving ahead to where we're at.

Indeed, morality should be the number one priority in selecting a belief system.

I have said the following before, do you think the gist of it is correct? Ignore the Gnostic Christian reference.

Both Christianity and Islam have basically developed into intolerant, homophobic and misogynous religions. Both religions have grown themselves by the sword instead of good deeds and continue with their immoral ways in spite of secular law showing them the moral ways.

Jesus said we would know his people by their works and deeds. That means Jesus would not recognize Christians and Muslims as his people, and neither do I. Jesus would call Christianity and Islam abominations.

Gnostic Christians did in the past, and I am proudly continuing that tradition and honest irrefutable evaluation based on morality.

Regards
DL

We are at real and not real.

Moving ahead to what? Real and -------

Regards
DL

People have abused the words real and unreal so badly that I wouldn't even try taking a stab at that unless you explained - clearly - what real and unreal mean to you.

Looks like a linguistic cop out.

What is wrong with how dictionaries define those words?
Do you want to invent a new definition?

You indicated you wanted to move forwards but do not seem to know what the road ahead looks like or where it leads to.

Regards
DL

Not at all, because I'm not trying to twist or turn the definitions of 'real'.

Since you're giving me nothing to go on as far as what you, 'GnosticBishop', place in the buckets of 'real' and 'not real' or any ideas regarding your own vetting process as to how things end up in those categories I'm going to have to walk out some of the worst implications of what seem to be your active assumptions in example.

Panda bears, until 1930, were fictional/fantasy creatures like Big Foot and the Loch Ness monster, because there was no broad-based scientific proof that such things existed aside from what seemed to be the wives tales of provincial farmers and people who tend to tell tall tales about things. By the definition of 'not real' being employed here pandas were, until the 1930's, not real and not worth considering, and they became real once the right person or group of people of the right academic or scientific discipline found them and were able to establish them as 'real'. The thing that's embarrassing about that usage of 'real' and 'unreal' is that the words become meaningless when a thing that's deemed not real can become real by the right human observation (utter BS) or that a thing that's 'real' at a given point, like ether theory of light, can become 'not real' scientists or other academics find out that they're wrong about it. By that definition, until enough people agreed that the earth revolved around the sun, the sun and planets revolved around the earth and a heliocentric orientation of the solar system was 'not real', or you could justify that the earth really was flat until enough people made a round planet 'real'.

If you were able to keep up with that at all I think you can see that I'm taking aim at the state of human knowledge as well as whatever we believe is 'real' or 'unreal' at any given mark in history. Our conventional models, like that of physics, are at least self-referentially coherent at this point but they're also swimming in a sea of small but significant anomalies that we don't understand and those anomalies could completely rearrange the context in which we see the structure we've built resting. Issues like the problem of consciousness, ie. that so-called dead matter should be able to give rise to consciousness at all regardless of whether neurons are magical like unicorns, is just one of the paradoxes that would suggest we're still trying to both a) examine reality according to experiment and b) entertain our biases too.

This is the reason I don't feel like we can even start to have an honest conversation until you actually explain what you consider real, unreal, and why. I'm outlining how academics use these words in embarrassing ways and, if the academics do it, there are probably much worse logical fallacies in the mind of some random person on the internet who wants to use the perceived weight and authority of those words but won't define what they'd categorize into those buckets.

In philosophical circles, it is said that the definition of words happens at the end of a discourse, not before it.

You want to bring the whole world and all it's linguistic anomalies, and our agreement and disagreements before we even know if we have any disagreements on real and unreal.

So I agree that we might not have what it takes to have a conversation because defining words is not a conversation.

Regards
DL

Lets try this again in maybe more concise wording:

Intelligent people don't typically go for calling things 'real' or 'unreal', they talk about evidence. You won't even bring up particulars or examples of what you consider real or unreal, so far it been more of a 'Oh, you know what I mean! The dictionary definition!" - I know that the dictionary means, I have no clue what you mean.

Try this.

Real has evidence to prove itself real. The unreal does not.

Regards
DL

Ok, but if you're going to evangelize to us what's real and not real you have to actually engage in the discussion of evidence. Otherwise no one has any idea what you're talking about, most people would rightly assume that you're mired in your emotions, that your arguments are purely from emotion, and that you're doing what any preachy evangelist worth their salt does which is throw loads of emotion and dogma at people without being willing to (or really able to) discuss facts.

Borrowing the language of skepticism, ie. real and unreal, gives us know assurance that you have any idea how to use those words correctly and the religious/evangelical overtones gives us plenty of good reason to doubt that you would (which is why I'd rather you give specifics so we can clarify whether you have any idea what you're talking about). All of this makes these sorts of threads really boring and ineffective.

What confuses me more though - if you're a reductive materialist-atheist just say so and if you like Jungian theories of self-analysis just say so. Going out in drag as a 'gnostic' is both confusing and grating. We have plenty of reductive materialists here, heck we've had plenty of anti-theists here, just that you'd be the first in my twelve year memory of WP whose arrived here in full costume claiming to be an authoritative priest of an ancient religion.

Not rightly. Wrongly.

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I am a Gnostic Christian which is all the label that I will accept for now instead of the 5 or 6 you have tried to put on me so far.

I am not interested in your in-depth psychological babble and labelling.

Let's get to the topic at hand or ends this foolishness shall we.

Regards
DL

I like GnosticBishop's writings here at WrongPlanet.net. I am, if pressed gently, also a gnostic Christian. No brick-and-mortar church contains me or my ideas conveniently, though I have stood at the edges of more than one Episcopal congregation. I hope GnosticBishop's writings continue. I might not always respond to them, but I do read them and see little need to chime in with the only remark I could make is "ditto."

Thanks for this.

How would you describe a Gnostic Christian and his ideology?

Not me please as I am likely seen as a mental bully due to feeling I have a duty not only to promote the Gnostic Christian ideology but also to actively fight those ideologies, like Christianity's, that I find immoral.

Ancient Gnostic Christians named Yahweh a vile demiurge for a reason and I follow their tradition and opinion.

Regards
DL

Then I'll squeeze it down to one:

You're a poser.

For you unwillingness to give examples of what you classify as 'real' or 'unreal' I'll have to assume you mean them about as coherently as an evangelical Christian would mean 'Christian' vs. 'devil worshiper'. Chunking things into loaded and/or broken categories and using otherwise valid categories in broken ways is a trick that religious and political zealots use to distort reality and prevent rebuttal.

I think I have every right to ask these questions because I'm not the one preaching to people on what to believe or not believe, nor am I trying to pass myself off as a gnostic Christian and speak for history or a community. If you take up those titles you take up the title of gnostic Christian, especially a bishop, we have to right to grill you on your facts. Similarly if you want to be the arbiter of what's real and not real and further won't even tell us what's in what category we have every right to grill you on that as well.

That's fine.

Blatant dishonesty bothers me too much on principle though. That's why I'm not giving him a free pass.